Mastodon

The last couple of weeks have seen the emergence of a new sub-genre in the press coverage of social media: my struggles with Mastodon. While not uniformly negative, these tales have relished the authors' cluelessness in the face of baffling concepts like "federated" and "instance". This is partly the traditional journalistic pose: you, dear readers, are idiots so I will perform idiocy as a way of explaining this new thing to you. But it also points to the underlying hatred for social media (which is really a hatred for democracy) that runs like a thread through newspaper coverage of the subject, and which is by no means limited to Twitter (the journalists' drug of choice), even if these articles inevitably serve as yet another excuse for linking the bird site in particular to the "toxic slurry" that supposedly disfigures our society. It becomes clear reading this sub-genre that what journalists really want is an environment that reflects their own self-worth. Unsurprisingly, some competitors to Twitter have sought to emphasise this, e.g. Post claims to be a platform for "Real People, Real News, and Civil Conversations". If that doesn't attract the liberal scolds then nothing will.

It's therefore amusing that Mastodon should have become the early leader in the field of alternatives to Twitter, given that it isn't particularly user-friendly and its politics (or at least those of its creator, Eugen Rochko) appear to be to the left of your average journalist. This is partly because so many other challengers have been promoted by the right, e.g. Parler and Truth Social, but partly because the politico-media caste have never really wanted to leave Twitter. Their fundamental criticism was not that it didn't do enough to counter abuse - it should be obvious now, as Elon Musk dismantles much of the moderation regime, that it actually did a good job in keeping a lid on it - but that it still allowed ordinary grunts on the platform. What they wanted was a more exclusive environment in which they could praise each other's "brilliant" articles or issue vapid press releases without getting laughed at by the great unwashed. Of course the problem with such exclusivity is that it can backfire, as the hilarious tale of journa.host reveals (in a nutshell: journalists set up their own instance; lots of other instances immediately defederated because they didn't want their content being scraped for stories).

Mastodon isn't going to supplant Twitter and the reason for that is as much to do with the technology as the cultural values. It is a halfway house between a fully distributed social network and a cloud-based common service. Conceptually, the former would require every user to provide and administer their own server. The point is that there would be no shared infrastructure beyond the Internet itself - i.e. the protocols that allow you to send and receive messages over a network. In practice a fully distributed system is constrained by the need to provide servers. Most users won't want the cost and hassle of providing their own, and they certainly don't want the administrative overhead this would entail. In other words, what Mastodon provides is both a collection of servers and (crucially) a devolved community of administrators. The rapid growth in the user base is causing the former to buckle under the strain, though this can be alleviated by throwing money at the problem and upgrading capacity, but the real choke point is the latter. Who wants to spend their free time reviewing sign-up requests and moderating content?

We've been here before. Mastodon is esentially a modern version of Usenet, the distributed bulletin board system that dates from the early 1980s. The similarities between Usenet groups and Mastodon instances, notably the discrimination over which peers to share feeds with, should be obvious. It should also be obvious that social media developed in part as a solution to the limitations of that older technology, not least the relative lawlessness of its group moderation (by the end, it was mostly being used for illegal file-sharing). Once access to the Internet was cheap and reliable, services could be consolidated "in the cloud", but this entailed a centralised administration as well. To pay for that, most social media services mixed advertising in with the user-generated content, which in turn created the incentives for surveillance and opaque algorithms. There's recently been a move towards more subscription-based services (e.g. Substack), but that has been driven more by the desire to monetise user content than to find an alternative to advertising. 

Mastodon cannot service a population the size of Twitter's near 400 million (it currently has less than one percent of that figure). The announcement by celebrities like Stephen Fry that they have moved over should alert us to the fact that its new users are overwhelmingly unlikely to want to provide their own servers or conduct content moderation, even if they knew how to do so. The "fediverse" depends on a community of nerds, and for those nerds to be a significant percentage of the total user base, willing to dedicate their own equipment and time to the common good. What's happening now is that Mastodon is attracting the jocks. To service this larger community individual instances will need to add both computing and moderation resources, and that ultimately means charging users. Given that the jocks are used to free stuff, this is either going to kill the growth or lead to Mastodon abandoning its principled objections to advertising and therefore surveillance. That is a bridge too far so pleas for donations are likely to dominate for the next few months. Ironically, the much foretold death of Twitter may be pushed out of the news shortly by the sudden death of multiple Mastodon instances.

As others have noted, the volume of users and posts that a celebrity brings in their train can amount to an unwitting denial of service attack for a Mastodon instance near the limit of its server capacity. That many instances now appear to be blocking or at least slowing new sign-ups is hardly a surprise. This highlights that the "cloud" has long served to obscure the fact that a person's online social network is not simply a matter of follower numbers but of linked activity, and that activity has a material cost in terms of the infrastructure required to support it. The blitheness with which media personalities announce that they're moving from Twitter to Mastodon (or to other platforms) is as good an example of dumb privilege as you can find online these days. When celebrities moan about their fans' presumption ("They think they own a bit of me") they forget that this proprietorial attitude cuts both ways. Imagining that your followers will loyally troop over to another platform ignores that a social network is not the product of your person but an emergent property of the medium. 

The growth of Mastodon, and the challenges faced by users in trying to join and navigate it, may create an opportunity for someone with a more commercial mindset than Rochko. Just as tools like TweetDeck sought to make Twitter more user-friendly (before being absorbed into the product), so we are likely to see a flurry of interfaces that seek to "simplify" Mastodon. In seeking to mask the limitations of the platform from "ordinary" users, it will make technical sense to consolidate this interface layer, creating a cloud-based superservice that will function pretty much like Twitter. But because of that consolidation and user affordance, it will face the same issues of moderation, regulatory observance and the need for a revenue stream to pay for its infrastructure. What this should remind us is that what people like about Twitter is the fact that it isn't federated: that it provides the serendipity of "weak ties" rather than the claustrophobia of a parochial interest group. That so many users find the "fediverse" baffling should be a clear indicator of that.

Twitter has barely changed since Musk bought it. The company may have seen upheaval aplenty in its personnel and working culture, and you can't rule out the possibility that bits of the system are going to start failing, but the idea that users would be driven away is clearly nonsense. The liberal media's critique is essentially that they'd prefer another owner - less rightwing and less vulgar - but they actually share Musk's vision of a social space that divides the fee-paying sheep from the goats: that is an environment they are familiar with and value. More democratic platforms like Mastodon are not what they want, and you can expect journalists who persist with it to soon take umbrage when administrators moderate them rather than the uncredentialled. The Mastodon sub-genre of newspaper comment is likely to prove short-lived but its demise will probably herald the arrival of another navel-gazing sub-genre: why I've come back to Twitter.

Social Democracy

The thing to understand about Twitter is that it is made entirely by its users, not simply in terms of the content but in terms of the interaction around that content. Comparable (and more popular) platforms like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok are ultimately narrowcasters whose experience is heavily determined by the feed algorithm. They are social only in the superficial sense that they employ the mechanics of a community - elective association, feedback and ostracism. In reality, they are opaque and controlling environments in which the needs of advertisers are paramount and interaction is limited and of poor quality. Twitter has attempted to pursue a similar path, but it has repeatedly been knocked back by its users (e.g. the preference for the chronological feed over the curated). The platform's anarchic, antisocial reputation arises from the fact that it is the most social environment, and one in which communities are formed less by the algorithm and more by actual social behaviours. The takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk has been reported mostly in terms of the financials - i.e. whether he overpaid for it and how he is going to ensure it makes a profit in the future - but the real issue is whether it will remain the best (if still numerically inferior) social medium we have.

It's now clear that Musk's intention is to divide Twitter into effectively two social spaces: the checkmarked subscribers and the great unwashed. The former will be spared advertising, the latter subjected to it. The former will be prioritised in the feed algorithm, the latter deprioritised (on the spurious grounds that this will help suppress bots and spam). These two spaces will overlap - the non-blue-tick will still be able to follow the blue-tick - but it is clear that Musk's vision is essentially one of soft segregation in which current antisocial practices (e.g. the mass blocking of the followers of followers, the limiting of replies etc) will become the norm. Unless you pay your subs (and perhaps not even then, if the rumours about pricing tiers prove true) you will be excluded from certain conversations. This development isn't simply the standard premium/freemium model in software pricing: it's an exercise in class engineering. And that class division reflects the prejudices and structural assumptions of the analogue world, particularly as mediated by the traditional press. 

As Janan Ganesh of the FT declared in explaining his decision to quit Twitter (which he did some time ago): "The site reeks of low status. And not because it is free." Despite his protestations, he clearly associates virtue with price: "“The elite don’t tweet,” I want to say, but some of them do, including its new owner. It just happens to cheapen them." So why did Ganesh really quit Twitter? A clue is provided in this claim: "There is no one trait that links all the high performers — in sport, art, politics, commerce — that I have had occasion to meet. But the nearest thing is a slightly humourless amour propre. It is the kind of personality that gets short shrift on Twitter, which is part of the site’s charm but also what leaves it with an anti-aspirational feel." As someone whom he blocked for taking the piss, I can confirm that Ganesh is both humourless and conceited. It has long been clear that the strength of Twitter as a medium for expert dissemination has been in tension with its social nature, and this is nowhere more obvious than among journalists who deeply resent that the public consider them fools or liars.

Musk has recognised that Twitter's USP is the calibre of its users. They may be fewer than Facebook or Instagram, but they generate far superior content, and as has always been the case with online communities, there is a stable ratio between heavy creators, heavy commenters and mere spectators (1:10:100). This means that Twitter has an inherent tendency towards elitism as much as democracy (aka "the mob"), which obviously chimes with Musk's own view of the world. The aim then is not simply to monetise the heavy creators and commenters but to institutionally mute the spectators who might occasionally comment and are thus crucial to that organic democracy known as the Twitter ratio. Whether Musk can effect this change without going bust is another matter, but we shouldn't under-estimate the appetite for such a segregated space among the super-rich who may be asked to bail him out.

Musk is held up as a man of the future: a visionary and a creator of new possibilities. But his ideas are actually notable for being old-fashioned: often the dreams of a bygone age. Musk's original break, in which he turned a small fortune into a larger one, was PayPal: a payments processing system that stripped of the online facilitation was really just another form of credit card, and thus a limited advance on the technology of the mid-twentieth century. Since then, Musk's enterprises have tended to gradually retreat further back in time: the hyperloop is an early twentieth century idea revived, the Boring Company is straight out of Jules Verne or HG Wells, while electric cars have been a thing since the nineteenth century. The mission to colonise Mars is arguably of even greater vintage. For this reason, I think it's fair to assume that Musk's plans for Twitter can best be understood by reading Plato rather than anything produced in Silicon Valley in recent years. His claim to be championing "the people" in rejecting the "lords & peasants system" of the old blue-tick in favour of a paid subscription doesn't take us any further forward than John Locke.

The suggestion that Twitter users will desert in droves to Mastodon strikes me as improbable. Not only is that platform likely to quickly buckle under the weight of additional users and greater content moderation demands, but its federated structure will lead to rapid fragmentation. This is perfectly consistent with its technical architecture, but it highlights that Mastodon isn't a cohesive social space so much as a collection of communities, much like the old blogosphere. There isn't an alternative to Twitter unless you want to give up your critical faculties and simply let the Facebook or Instagram alogorithm wash over you: the "atmosphere of domestic mediocrity" that Ganesh identifries with the bird site but which is really more characteristic of its larger rivals. As a result, I think most users will remain on Twitter and will continue to appreciate its benefits even as they are steadily eroded. In other words, I suspect Twitter will prove far more resilient in the face of Musk's "dumb stuff" than the media coverage currently suggests, and that's because it remains a social space in which collective resistance is possible.

Varieties of Conservatism

The rolling crisis at Westminster since 2008 centres on the failure of our political parties to move on from neoliberalism. This is not simply a case of an interregnum birthing morbid symptoms, but more fundamentally a refusal to countenance change. That might appear paradoxical given the disruption of Brexit and the recent, quickly-aborted experiment in "trickle-down economics", but at heart these were exercises in nostalgia, not fresh departures, and just as fixated on the past as the recurrent anxiety over the diminution of the welfare state (an ever-present theme in the postwar era) and the vogue for a "levelling-up" that gestures towards the social destruction of the past forty years without the need for any redress beyond some ill-defined "infrastructure". This has produced what Colin Crouch describes as "a democratic politics that finds it increasingly difficult to address voters as adults who must think about their collective as well as their individual selves". But I think Crouch underplays the extent to which the parties are casting about for the language of communal interest, whether that be Blue Labour's mawkishness or the Tory right seeking to defend the nation against the "invasion" of Albanian migrants.

Tariq Ali has a not dissimilar analysis but he correctly, in my view, notes how this has given the times a distinctly regressive air. Commenting on the defenestration of Liz Truss he noted: "The outgoing PM is herself a symptom of this social crisis, shaped by Britain’s exhausted financialized economy, bankrupt post-imperial foreign policy, exclusionary parliamentary system and creaking multinational state. What the British ruling class needs is a real conservative government – with or without the capital C – to protect and stabilize this political order. In this sense Starmer would be more sellable than Sunak, since he can be framed as something new rather than something borrowed and something blue. Yet mimicking Thatcher has so far proven useless, and imitating Blair will be no better." As we prepare for Austerity 2.0 and the Labour Party seeks to erase the Corbyn interlude from history, it is clear that what we are witnessing is both a conservative reaction by the establishment and an attempt to conjure a conservative electorate into being in time for the next general election. It's worth looking at this in more detail to understand the relationship of the parties.

According to George Eaton in The New Statesman, "Sunak is the UK’s most Thatcherite prime minister since Thatcher herself". That's pretty meaningless when you consider her contradictory impulses, such as her English chauvinism and her championing of the EU single market, neither of which chime with the current inhabitant of Number 10. What Eaton means is that Sunak is not the technocrat "who will administer harsh but necessary medicine" but is instead an ideologue who will seek to shrink the welfare state and protect class interests. Exactly how that makes him different to any other Conservative Party leader since Margaret Thatcher isn't that clear. Indeed, he looks an awful lot like a Brexity Cameron. Explicitly stating that you will take money from "deprived urban areas" and give it to Tunbridge Wells isn't the novelty Eaton imagines. The rather obvious objective here is not merely to suggest that Keir Starmer is the true "pragmatic centrist", in whom we could expect to find competent, technocratic leadership, but to paint him as the continuity candidate not just of New Labour but of a more responsible Tory tradition that stands in opposition to Thatcher.

The irony is that this means Starmer is being positioned as the Johnsonite candidate. The political commentariat are only too well aware that the former Prime Minister remains popular with the electorally-significant bloc labelled the "red wall", but which more accurately is older voters who own their homes outside of South East England. Labour will be cast as the true party of levelling-up and Sunak as the champion of London and the South East (despite being a Yorkshire MP). The Labour leader's near-pathological reluctance to commit to significant policies, while happily trumpeting socially conservative views, is not some cunning plan that will produce an eye-catching manifesto in two years. It is rather a clear message that he intends minimal change, and will even go so far as to ape the Tories in style as well as substance, a point that his supporters in the press are only too happy to highlight. The suggestion that the party is about to adopt a strategy of shifting taxation from income to wealth, so departing from the orthodoxy of the last 75 years, is wishful-thinking.

One reason I'm sceptical about the lesser evil argument for supporting Labour now is that Starmer shows every sign of wanting to supplant the Tories as the true conservative party, pushing them to the margins as an unrepresentative and reckless party of libertarians with "foreign" ideas. You can dress this strategy up as Labour positioning itself as "the natural party of government", in Harold Wilson's words, but what we are not being offered is the idea of Labour as the party of progressive reform. While Tony Blair paid lip-service to progressive notions, and may even have been sincere about some of them, Starmer has never taken a position that could be considered progressive, let alone radical. This is partly down to electoral calculation - those "red wall" voters - but it also appears to reflect his own temperament. For all the talk of his work as a human rights lawyer, it is clear that the former Director of Public Prosecutions has wholly internalised the establishment's conservative worldview, from trans rights to electoral reform.

As someone once said, there were three of us in this marriage. In addition to Sunak and Starmer, Andrew Bailey, the Bank of England Governor, is also in the business of defining conservatism. It has been much remarked that the two-step of monetary and fiscal policy since 2008 has now changed. Where previously one would offset the other - low interest rates ameliorating some of the pain from cuts to government spending - now we have both pushing in the same direction, which is certain to exacerbate the coming recession. That this is being done to stop inflation exceeding 5%, a historically unremarkable level, indicates that there is a political dimension to the bank's intervention at a time when the government is signalling that it intends to suck demand out of the economy. The issue appears to be the belief that the labour market is too tight, and that this will lead to rising wage demands and thus the potential for upward pressure on prices. It's hard not to believe that the latest hike in interest rates to 3% is a direct response to the current wave of strike action. In other words, it is Bailey, not Sunak, who should be considered the echt Thatcherite.